One Woman’s Drug-Resistant TB, Echoing Around the World

Rahima Sheikh’s yearslong effort to beat tuberculosis left her, in the end, all but untreatable. She displays scans in the Mumbai slum she shared with her husband and daughter.

By Geeta Anand

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal has the story of Rahima Sheikh, one of India’s first documented cases of tuberculosis that is resistant to virtually all the medicines approved to treat it.

Over the past six years, Mrs. Sheikh, 40 years old, mortgaged her family’s rice fields, spent her father’s and brother’s life savings, and crisscrossed India in search of a cure for tuberculosis. But instead of getting healthier, Mrs. Sheikh grew increasingly resistant to medication with each failed treatment.

Her six-year journey to all-but-incurable TB exposes a blind spot in an Indian medical bureaucracy that, for decades, neglected to implement widespread testing or treatment for drug-resistant strains.

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